Between Ancestors and Algorithms

Written By ESSOESS

The internet is full of people calling in Spirits they don’t understand.

Lighting candles to deities they can’t pronounce. Packaging ancestral rituals into aesthetic routines. Selling “manifestation hacks” as if they weren’t born from cosmologies that once got our elders burned, chained, exiled, or erased.

An entire spiritual economy now runs on rituals our ancestors were punished for—and most of the time, no one even bothers to name where it came from.

I didn’t set out to build a media platform.
I set out to build a correction.

Because somewhere between the viral breathwork reels and AI-generated priestesses, I felt the fracture: sacred knowledge extracted, repackaged, and sold back to us—without context, without credit, without care.

ESSOESS came through that fracture.
Not as a brand. Not as a business.
As a reckoning.

Because technology was never meant to be soulless.
It became soulless when we let it forget who fed it.

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The deeper I looked, the clearer it became:
what we now call "wellness culture" is often a curated remix of African and Indigenous traditions stripped of their roots.

Smudging, divination, crystal work, energy healing—all foundational practices in global Black and brown spiritual systems—have been filtered through whiteness and commerce. The result is a trillion-dollar industry that praises the ritual but erases the people.

According to the Global Wellness Institute, the global wellness economy was valued at $5.6 trillion in 2022. Wellness tourism alone was worth $651 billion. But none of these numbers track how often these rituals come from spiritual systems that were once criminalized—and still remain underfunded, unprotected, or mocked when practiced in their original form.

White sage is now endangered in parts of California due to overharvesting for mass-market spiritual kits, despite being a sacred medicine in many Indigenous cultures (California Native Plant Society). Ayahuasca ceremonies—once held by Indigenous shamans deep in the Amazon—are now sold out in weekend retreats hosted by influencers. Palo Santo, long used in Afro-Latin and Indigenous South American spiritual work, has become a scent in overpriced boutique candles (Beauty Independent).

This isn’t just cultural appropriation.
It’s spiritual laundering.

What happens when you build digital tools on top of stolen rituals, drained of responsibility, accountability, or origin?

You get platforms that preach healing without naming harm.
You get interfaces that track your breath but not your bloodline.
You get media ecosystems that tokenize Black diviners while building billion-dollar tech stacks off the wisdom they inherited.

ESSOESS isn’t here to compete with that.
It’s here to interrupt it.

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If you study the architecture of today’s platforms, you’ll notice something:
they’re designed to distribute information, not to hold meaning.
They optimize for attention—not memory, not depth, and certainly not Spirit.

Every scroll is engineered to trigger, not to transform.
Every algorithm rewards speed over soul.
The most visible voices aren’t always the wisest—just the most clickable.

What gets prioritized?
Volume. Visibility. Virality.
What gets lost?
Ritual. Context. Ceremony. Time. sacredness.

That’s not a glitch. That’s the blueprint.

In 2021, former Facebook (Meta) employee Frances Haugen revealed internal research showing that the company’s platform architecture was amplifying outrage because those emotions kept users engaged longer (Time, Wikipedia). It wasn’t an accident—it was the business model.

But what happens when people seeking healing enter digital spaces built to fracture them?

When spiritual knowledge becomes content, it’s subject to the rules of that system:
flatten it, aestheticize it, feed it to the scroll.

But spiritual technologies require something else.
They require containment.
They require ceremony.
They require us to honor sacredness—to create space for what cannot be rushed, filtered, or monetized.

ESSOESS isn’t just a media platform.
It’s an invocation in code.

A digital altar. A ceremonial interface.
A place where the sacred isn’t stripped, it’s amplified—designed to hold complexity, beauty, contradiction, grief, glamour, truth, and time.

And where the Source is never forgotten—because the Source is built into the structure.

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ESSOESS is a return to intentional systems.
It is built to hold power, not flatten it.

One that doesn’t dilute Spirit to make it profitable.
One that doesn’t flatten our stories into trends.
One where the Divine isn’t an algorithm—but the architecture itself.

ESSOESS is not the answer to the algorithm.
It is the refusal.
The resurrection.
The return.

A platform coded in reverence.
A vision authored by Spirit.
A system that doesn’t just distribute content—it protects culture.

Because we are not data points.
We are prophecy.
And we are no longer waiting to be archived by someone else’s system.

One love, ESS xo

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References

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